"AND
the fifth Angel poured out his Vial on the throne of the Beast: and his
kingdom was darkened.”—Apoc. 16:10.
We have here predicted the outpouring of a Vial of judgment on the
Beast’s throne and kingdom, consecutive on that of the former Vial.
Now as to the locality on which this Vial was to be poured out, there
cannot, I think, be a doubt. The throne, or seat, of the Beast was the
same as that of the seven-headed Dragon, representing the Roman Pagan
power before him: for it is said, “The Dragon gave to him (the Beast)
his throne and power, &c.” It was the throne of the seven hills, the See
of ROME.—And precisely in accordance with the prediction of the text,
thus interpreted, we find that immediately after the battle of Wagram in
1809, and re-subjection of Austria,—the closing historic fact noted in
my exposition of the fourth Vial,—there were issued by Napoleon the two
celebrated Decrees of Schönbrunn and Vienna, (Decrees to which I shall
again advert ere concluding this Chapter,) whereby the Pope’s temporal
authority over the Roman State was abolished, and ROME itself
incorporated with France, as the second city of its empire.
But this in truth was only the consummation of insults and injuries,
heaped by the French on the Papal power from almost the very
commencement of their Revolution. I have had occasion to glance at this
fact, and cursorily to illustrate it, more than once in the general
historical sketches given in my Chapter iii preceding. But it becomes a
necessary part of my duty to set it forth more distinctly and fully in
the present Chapter. For the solution of the great question of the
termination of the 1260 years of prophecy is connected with it. If, as I
have supposed in common with many other interpreters, the 1260 predicted
year-days of Papal supremacy began primarily, though imperfectly, with
the quaternion of years from 529 to 533, that witnessed the promulgation
of the Popedom-exalting Justinian Code, and commencing adhesion of the
ten Romano-Gothic kingdoms and kings to the Pope, as spiritual head of
Christendom, then ought the quaternion of years, 1260 years after,—that
is, from 1789 to 1793, the opening æra of the Revolution,—to be marked,
as a primary though imperfect end to the 1260 years, by some great blow
at the Papal supremacy;—then Daniel’s prophecy about the “taking away of
dominion from it, to consume and to destroy it unto the end,” to have
had coincidently a commencement of accomplishment.4—Let us note then
what history reports on this point; and mark the earlier spoiling of the
Pope’s Ecclesiastical Civitas, or the Romish Church, ere we revert to
the subsequent subversion of his throne.
Now significant symptoms had not been wanting for full half a century
before the French Revolution, which showed the attachment of many of the
Western kings to have more than grown cold towards the Pope, and a
preparation of mind to have risen up within them, if not for the
overthrow of his domination, yet for some spoliation of the Church his
associate. But as yet there was no mortal blow struck by any of them
against Papal supremacy. This was reserved to the epoch of the
Revolution; and to that country which under Clovis, 1300 years before,
had first of the Western Kingdoms attached itself to Rome, and of which
the king thenceforward in consequence had borne the title of Eldest Son
of the Church.
The blow was there and then instantaneous. Scarce was the National
Assembly constituted in the summer of 1789, when it entered on its
course of spoliation. The Clergy, who formed one of the Estates, had so
little anticipated this, that, on the conflict between the Nobles and
the Tiers Etat, they in large numbers joined the latter; and thus
materially helped to turn the scale, and precipitate the Revolution.
But, regardless of the help so given it, one of the first measures of
the Assembly was to abolish tithes, establishing an insufficient
rent-charge on the State. in lieu of them; a second at one fell swoop to
sever from the Church, and appropriate as national property, all
ecclesiastical lands throughout the kingdom:—lands, let it be observed,
which had been regarded ever before as not French property only, but
that too of the Catholic or Roman Church; and as needing therefore the
Pope’s sanction to its alienation. Then followed the suppression of all
monastic houses in the kingdom, to the number of 4000: and, in regard of
the Clergy, already made pensioners of the State, the substitution of
popular election for institution after the Papal Concordat; and the
requirement from each of them, on pain of forfeiture of the pension, of
a solemn abjuration of all allegiance to the Pope. And then in 1793, the
last year of the four, a Decree was issued for the abolition of the
Christian (or rather Romish) religion in France: whereupon the Churches
were many of them razed to the ground; others left in partial ruin; and
of the rest, now shut against priests and worshippers, the most sacred
places defiled, (the visible memorial of which desecration remained long
after,) the treasures rifled, and the bells broken, and cast into
cannon.—So was the whole French ecclesiastical establishment then
destroyed. As to the French clergy themselves, 24,000 were massacred;2
and this, as before stated, with every the most horrid atrocity. The
rest, for the most part utterly beggared, found refuge from the popular
fury only by flight into other and chiefly Protestant lands; bearing
about with them everywhere visible evidence that the predicted
outpouring of judgment had begun on the mystic Babylon, and darkness
gathered over the Papal kingdom.
Begun in France, the spoliation of the harlot-Church, and of its Papal
patron and head, spread quickly into the other countries of Christendom.
A propagandist spirit, in respect of this as in respect of its other
principles, was one of the essential characteristics of the Revolution;
and the tempests of war gave it wings. Its first translation was into
Belgium and the Rhenish provinces of Germany; the latter “the chief
seat,” as Ranke terms it, “of the ecclesiastical form of government.”
Thither it brought with it ecclesiastical changes analogous to those in
France.—In the years 1796, 1797, French dominion being established by
Buonaparte’s victories in Northern Italy, it bore with it thither the
similar accompaniment, as of French democratism and infidelity, so too
of French anti-papalism.—And then, Rome itself being laid open to
Buonaparte, and the French armies urging their march onward to the Papal
Capital, the Pope only saved himself and it by the formal cession in the
Treaty of Tolentino of the Legations of Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna,
(Peter’s Patrimony,) together with the city of Ancona; the payment of
above £1,500,000 sterling,—a sum multiplied three-fold by exactions and
oppression;3—and the surrender of military stores, and of a hundred of
the finest paintings and statues in the Vatican. The French ambassador
wrote from Rome to Buonaparte; “The payment of 30 millions [of francs],
stipulated by the Treaty of Tolentino, has totally exhausted this old
carcase: we are making it consume by a slow fire.”5—The aged Pope
himself, now left mere nominal master of some few remaining shreds of
the Patrimony of Peter, experienced soon after in person the bitterness
of the prevailing anti-papal spirit. On pretence of an insult to the
French Ambassador there, a French corps d’armée under Berthier, having
in February 1798 crost the Apennines from Ancona, and entered Rome, the
tricolour flag was displayed from the Capitol, amidst the shouts of the
populace, the Pope’s temporal reign declared at an end, and the Roman
Republic proclaimed, in strict alliance and fraternization with the
French. Then, in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican, the ante-hall to
which has a fresco painted by Papal order commemorative of the
Protestant massacre on St. Bartholomew’s day, (might not the scene have
served as a memento of God’s retributive justice?) there, while seated
on his throne, and receiving the gratulations of his cardinals on the
anniversary of his election to the Popedom,2 he was arrested by the
French military, the ring of his marriage with the Church Catholic torn
from his finger, his palace rifled, and himself carried prisoner into
France, only to die there in exile shortly after.4—The Vial had thus
touched the throne of the Beast, just in Apocalyptic order, after the
first and earlier sprinkling of each of the four preceding Vials: and
the confiscation of all territorial possessions of the Church and
monasteries, and the pillage of the Pope’s library, museum, furniture,
jewels, and even sacerdotal robes, told before the world of its
outpouring. Nor, though the temporary success of the allies under
Suwarrow made feasible the election of another Pope, and temporarily
repaired the ruin of the Papal throne,6 was it anything more than an
intermission from further evils yet to come.
For the hopes of an end to these persecutions of Rome and its
harlot-Church, excited by Buonaparte’s restoration of the Romish
religion in France on his assumption of the first Consulship, (a mere
political step, as I have already stated,) quickly proved delusive. The
Romish religion was recognised by him only in common, and on an equal
footing, with other forms of Christianity.2 In Rhenish Germany, now a
part of the mighty French Empire, temporal Princes, alike Protestant and
Catholic, were appointed to the old Romish bishoprics and ecclesiastical
principalities; in utter contempt of the ancient canon law, by which
heresy involved the actual forfeiture of all power, title, and property:
and in the very provisions of the French Concordat, made this year,
1801, with the Pope, there was a total abnegation of all Papal
supremacy, and even Papal influence, in the ecclesiastical state of
France.—In 1803 the Concordat made by Buonaparte with the Pope for the
kingdom of Italy exhibited no other provisions than those for France.—In
the autumn of 1804 the Pope, summoned to Paris as a vassal to crown
Napoleon Emperor, or rather to give consecration to his crowning,
obeyed, in the rekindled hope of the restoration of the Papal patrimony:
but in vain. Nor was the Emperor’s coronation next year at Milan, as
King of Italy, more fruitful to the Romish harlot-Church. “The designs
of Napoleon,” says Ranke, “were now revealed … The Constituent [or
National] Assembly had endeavoured to emancipate itself entirely from
the Pope. The Directory wished to annihilate his authority. Buonaparte’s
notion was to retain him, but in a state of absolute subjection; to make
him a tool of his own boundless ambition.”—After a while indeed he was
permitted to return to Rome. But, on his resistance to the oppressor’s
views, there followed within four short years after, i.e. in 1809, the
full outpouring of the Vial on his throne, or see, in those anti-papal
Decrees of Napoleon from Schönbrunn and Vienna to which I made allusion
at the beginning of this Chapter: Decrees to which,—as both Naples had
now been formed into a dependant kingdom under Murat, and Spain into
another dependant kingdom under Joseph Buonaparte, and Austria, after
the victory of Wagram, forced into a political and matrimonial alliance
with the French Emperor,—all the ten kingdoms of Western Christendom
(England alone excepted, the tenth of the city, already long since
broken off from the Popedom) might have appeared before the world
assenting and consenting parties. I say with all these as apparently
consenting, if not co-operating parties,—viz. Louis King of Holland,
Jerome of Westphalia, the Princes of the confederation of the Rhine,
(including Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and the Swiss Cantons,) the Austrian
Emperor, the King of Italy, (a kingdom comprehending Savoy, Lombardy,
and Tuscany,) the King of Naples too, and King of Spain and
Portugal,—Napoleon issued from Schönbrunn and Vienna his Decrees for the
final humbling and spoliation of the Romish Church and Pope:5 Decrees of
which the purport was the revocation of Charlemagne’s donations to the
Holy See, the annexation of the duchies of Urbino, Ancona, Macerata, and
Camarino for ever to the kingdom of Italy, the total and final abolition
of the Pope’s temporal authority, and incorporation of Rome as its
second city with the French Empire:—a committee of administration having
been appointed for the Roman civil government; and a salary settled on
the Pope,2 as a mere pensionary of the State, in his spiritual
character. The Pope vented the bitterness of his soul in the fulmination
of an excommunication of the French Emperor and his adherents, expressed
after the old model, and with the old haughty Papal pretensions. But it
was only to serve as a memorial, by its detail of wrongs, of the
fulfilment of the predicted outpouring of judgment on the Papal throne,
and darkening of his kingdom: and by its perfect impotency of effect,
and the ridicule it met with, of the fact of the days of Papal
supremacy, such as of old, being ended. A little after, as if sensible
of the hopelessness of the Papal fall, and in forced resignation to his
fate, being carried off prisoner by the French, first to Savona,6 then
to Fontainebleau, he signed a new Concordat, of which the very
preliminary condition was his separation for ever from Rome. So did he
set his own seal to the fact of the outpouring of this Vial on the Papal
throne having been consummated.—It was Napoleon’s policy and intention
to fix him and the Papal See in the Archiepiscopal Palace at Paris;—the
spiritual head of the Catholic Church, under his own eye and restraint,2
in the new capital of Catholicism. And indeed all tended to that result:
which however could scarcely be, because inspired prophecy connected the
Popedom and Rome essentially together, until Rome’s final and terrible
destruction, not by man but God. Accordingly the sudden and wonderful
overthrow of Napoleon’s power occurred to prevent it; an overthrow more
sudden than even its rise. But even then, and when so strangely, as De
Pradt says, “Catholicity having deserted him, four heretical kings bore
the Pope back to Rome,”4 still he sate not on his throne as once before.
His power was crippled; his seat unstable; the riches of his Church
rifled; and a mighty precedent and principle of action established
against him:—a precedent and principle which could scarce fail of
bearing similarly bitter fruit afterwards; and so of prolonging, or
renewing, the consuming judgment on the Beast predicted in Daniel, and
darkening of his kingdom, predicted in the Apocalypse.
And so in fact it happened. For, as to the subsequent attempted
re-establishment of Papal superstition and Papal supremacy by the
Bourbons, Ferdinand, Miguel, and the Pope, in France, Spain, Portugal,
and Italy, I must remind the reader that the revolutions which occurred
in the three former countries weakened not a little the ill-cemented
reconstructions:—the result down to the reign of Louis Philippe,
1830–1848, being that in France the Romish Church still remianed
impoverished, and legally only on a footing of equality with other
religions, very much, so far, as under Napoleon: that in Portugal it
remained spoiled of its ecclesiastical domains, by the decrees of the
secular power in 1835: and that in Spain it suffered a similar
confiscation of much of the immense church-property of that “most
catholic” of countries; a confiscation completed under the rule of Queen
Christina and the Regent Espartero. Which last-mentioned act of
spoliation is the subject of a Papal Apostolic Letter, published not
long after, “ordaining public prayers on account of the unhappy state of
religion in Spain, together with a plenary indulgence in the form of a
jubilee:”—a memorial in these its expressions alike of the continued
harlotry of the Romish Church, and of the continued darkening of the
splendours of its once dominant and proud kingdom.4 And though in Italy
it has hitherto kept the domains re-assigned to it at the Peace of
Paris, yet significant symptoms have not been wanting to show that there
too the democratic anti-Papal spirit, infused under the French
domination, is not extinct; and that it only awaits its opportunity to
take part in the renewal of its assaults on Rome.2—At the same time it
must ever be remembered, in looking both to present and to future, that
the Apocalyptic prophecy in a subsequent notice in this Chapter
intimates a revival of energy in the Papal Beast ere the expiration of
the æra of the 6th Vial,—a prediction of which we shall have soon to
show the remarkable accomplishment. Moreover in Apoc. 18 there is
implied some kindly feeling towards Rome on the part of the Western
kings, at the epoch of its great and final destruction. But in all this
paragraph I have been anticipating.3
Thus have I shown the fulfilment of the Apocalyptic prophecy of the
outpouring of a vial of wrath on the throne of the Papal Beast, and of
its kingdom being darkened, as the fifth act in the judgments of the
seventh Trumpet. And hence, as will be obvious, the fitness of the epoch
of the French Revolution’s outbreak to constitute a primary, though
imperfect, terminating epoch to the 1260 predicted year-days of Papal
domination and supremacy.—Let me, in concluding the present Chapter, add
two brief remarks in further illustration of its fitness. The first is,
that the then establishment by the Revolutionary laws, and afterwards by
the Napoleonic Code, of equal toleration to Protestants as to Roman
Catholics, (the former a proscribed class up to that epoch in the
continental kingdoms on the territory of the old Roman Western Empire,)
seems to point it out as the time when the two symbolic witnesses may be
considered also to have begun partially to put off their sackcloth. The
second is that the continuance in force even until then, in the several
countries of Papal Christendom, of the old Popedom-favouring Code of
Justinian, a Code first promulgated, as we have seen, in the years
529–533, and its then sudden and rapid supersession by new anti-Papal
Codes that originated from, and expressed the spirit of, the French
Revolution of A.D. 1789–1793, are facts that furnish a very notable mark
of contrast between the characters, juridically and constitutionally
considered, of those epochs of primary commencement and primary ending,
respectively, (according to my view of the matter,) to the 1260 years.
Elliott, E. B. (1862). Horæ Apocalypticæ; or, A Commentary on the
Apocalypse, Critical and Historical (Fifth Edition, Vol. 3, pp.
395–410). Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.